I’ve been a bad, bad girl.

Guess who’s back on their bullshit! This girl! That’s right, I’m a bad, bad girl! But not THAT kind of bad girl. No, I’ve been the boring kind. Not the kind you see movies about. You know the movies I’m talking about; where some beautiful starlet is wild and fun and out of control. And she makes mental illness look sexy until the final act of her bad girl struggle where her lips are a little chapped and her eyes a little too wide and kind of scary but still what someone might call “totally bangable.” Yeah, that wasn’t me. I had food stains on my shirt, bags under my bloodshot eyes, and I didn’t move from my couch for so long it gave me back problems. But I don’t think that makes for an entertaining movie.

I stopped taking my medications. No real reason, except for that I missed a doctors appointment. I forgot to put it in my calendar and then I missed it. I got a note, basically a written wrap on the knuckles, from my doctor reminding me that I shouldn’t do that again and, if I could, please refrain from wasting their time. Which I totally understood and felt guilty about. So that guilt stopped me from making another (because they’ll see my name and think “that girl! That stupid girl who wasted our time. Look at this bullshit, wanting another appointment”) So then I ran out of pills. Then I kept eating foods (because, hey there substitute for medication and self esteem and friendship and love) and gained weight. And I knew that all of these things meant I should get back on medication. But I needed to lose weight so the doctor wouldn’t talk to me about how much I needed to lose weight. Plus, they’ll know it’s been a while and that I stopped my meds when I shouldn’t have. So yes, I’ve been the unsexiest bad girl and I need to be punished with lectures about how I’ve let people down. I’m a disappointment, daddy. Sternly tell me how much I’ve disappointed you. Am I doing this right? I don’t think I’m doing this right.

I’m actually at a point now where I feel pretty good in terms of energy and getting things done. And I’m not letting my entire life and relationships backslide so that I have to rebuild EVERYTHING. But I can’t sleep at night. The obsessive thought patterns are back and I’m having trouble making them be quiet. (Side note: why do my obsessive thoughts have to be about the general nature of death? Why can’t it be mathematical equations or entertaining stories or brilliant articles or something that makes use of this broken brain bullshit? It’s always so dreadfully, existentially boring). I wish I had a legit reason for getting to this place again. It would be easier. But all I have are basically excuses for not doing the things I should be doing. What can I say? Broken-brain bullshit happens, I guess. I’m trying not to hate myself too much which is not an easy feat for any of us. We’re, all of us, olympic medalling experts in the self hating endurance event. I guess the best thing to do is take stock of how better this time was vs. the last time and look at what I did right. I didn’t completely fall back. A minor slide into a dungheap is better than a headlong dive. And it isn’t hopeless. It’s just difficult. But what life isn’t difficult, really? Mine, by comparison, is relatively easy. Just a minor bout with broken-brain bullshit.

Spring is here and everything seems to be in bloom now. I was born in the spring so I’m a creature of rebirth, I guess. Hopefully I don’t get reborn as the same thing. Here’s to another sloughing off of the skin. The next bad girl will be a little better.

Like this:

Once upon a time, not very long ago . . . in fact happening right now, there lived a girl (okay, a woman of a certain age range that we will not address here) named Erin the Slothful. Continue reading “A Sorta Fairytale”→

When I was a teen, nothing was bigger than MTV. It was the end-all, be-all of television. It was THE cultural touchstone for Gen-X’ers and some early Millenials. And if you grew up in Nowhere, Kansas (where the tumbleweeds roamed free and the nearest city with a decent mall was 3 hours away), MTV was the gateway to the rest of the world. I watched world premier music videos from Madonna and Michael Jackson. I got to see spring break be wild before I even knew what wild could be. Kurt Loader told us when Kurt Kobain died. Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, and 120 Minutes showed me that there was music beyond country and easy listening.

Like this:

I’d been thinking about voids a lot lately. Not a space where something is missing or gone but an endless vortex of darkness. Having depression means circling that vortex more often than one should and fighting very hard not to get sucked in. When you battle, you try to save yourself but you keep slipping anyway. And you’re never far away from that vortex. It’s always there, sometimes in the distant background where you don’t even remember why you worry about it. Sometimes it’s right next to you, a constant reminder that you’ll never escape it. When you lean over that vortex to peer into it’s blackness, there’s a pull. “Fall in. You want to. Stop fighting. Just fall in.” What is it about this disease that has us fighting against the basic human instinct of survival? Continue reading “Into the Void”→

I had to make an evening visit to the hospital a few nights ago due to persistent symptoms of gaucheness. Or to put it another way, I was clumsy and hurt myself. I was making myself a salad and cutting up some green leaf lettuce with a fairly new knife. I hadn’t had a new knife set in over a decade so sharp knives are still a bit new to me. I was being a bit quick and careless and I hit my thumb. I laughed at myself after it happened and just tried to get the bleeding to stop. It hurt a little but it wasn’t the first time I’d done that (persistent symptoms of gaucheness) so I wasn’t too alarmed until my thumb didn’t stop bleeding about 20 minutes later. I called my parents to see what the time limit is on when you should call it and just go get stitches – as it turns out the time limit is 20 minutes.

I was in 7th grade and wearing a new Pearl Jam t-shirt (even though all I knew of Pearl Jam at the time was what I’d heard on MTV). It had a little girl with paper and crayons on the front and on the back it said “9 out of 10 kids prefer crayons to guns.” Super edgy and smart, right? I was so excited to show off my alternativeness (hipsters didn’t have anything on 90’s grunge attitude). No one anything to me about the shirt until I left math class later that morning. We had just been dismissed and were flowing out of the room into a crowded hallway when I heard two guys laughing behind me.Continue reading “I Am Mine (Some of the Time)”→